The Obama administration's second Open Government National Action Plan introduces 23 new or expanded commitments to open government, including measures to strengthen whistleblower protections and improve the declassification process.

The Public Interest Declassification Board wants high-level attention to address ever-increasing shortcomings in the way agencies classify and declassify documents. The system is considered by many broken and now is being inundated by electronic records. The National Declassification Center has completed equity referral quality assurance on 278 million pages, and completed all processing of more than 118 million pages of this backlog.

Current and former Obama administration officials' use of personal email addresses and secret, secondary email accounts to conduct official business came under scrutiny Tuesday at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said her use of a secret account was to do her job more efficiently.

Joseph Frankovic looked around his office at the Federal Register and saw that it was being overrun by binder clips. At a time when agencies are struggling to save budget dollars wherever they can, Frankovic saw an opportunity to make a difference - and he took it.

GSA led a 12-member interagency working group to create a set of measures specifically aimed at defining the usefulness of social media for agencies. The agency also released an API that lets users create tools to bring together government social media feeds in one place. Both tools are called for in the Digital Government Strategy.

The Public Interest Declassification Board submitted 14 recommendations to President Barack Obama at the end of November. The suggestions cover everything from moving out of the three-tiered classification system to a two-tiered process to strengthening the National Archives and Records Administration's National Declassification Center to giving federal employees "safe harbor" protection if they adhere to a rigorous risk management process in how they perform their classification duties.

Casey Coleman, CIO at the GSA, gives a preview of the 2012 Executive Leadership Conference. Lynn Bernabei, a partner with Bernabei and Watchel, discusses the House's sweeping update to the law protecting federal whistleblowers. Tom Fox of the Partnership for Public Service tells how managers can keep their workforce motivated in tough times. Miriam Nisbet of the National Archives discusses a new website aimed at speeding up the FOIA request process.

The Environmental Protection Agency partnered with the Commerce Department and National Archives to launch a new online portal aimed at streamlining the Freedom of Information Act request process for both the public and federal agencies.

A number of agencies have made high-profile
migrations to cloud platforms and the Obama
administration has issued sweeping guidance
mandating agencies identify and transition
services and applications to host in the cloud.
For a look at how agencies are faring in their
shifts to the cloud and the issues they
continue to face, the Federal
Drive with Tom Temin and Emily Kopp
hosted a panel discussion, "Clearing the Fog
Around Cloud Computing," sponsored by Level 3
Communications.

Agencies are installing white, reflective
roofs, solar panels and plant-filled green roofs to cut down on energy costs and save taxpayers money. This is all in response to President Barack Obama's executive order requiring agencies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy efficiency.

A new directive requiring agencies to move to electronic forms of record-keeping by 2020 will push an often two-steps-behind federal government fully into the 21st century, said Paul Wester, the director of modern records program at the National Archives and Records Administration. A key part of the directive is to expand and elevate the role of agency records managers. The guidance directs NARA and the Office of Personnel Management to develop a specific records-management career track institutionalize responsibilities and best practices.

A new White House directive provides a roadmap for agencies to phase out the use of paper record-keeping by the end of the decade. By Dec. 31, 2019, federal agencies will be required, "to the fullest extent possible," to manage records electronically — including digital forms of communication, such as email — according to a directive from the Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives and Records Administration.

The National Records and Archives Administration
will modify its Electronic Records
System for the first time since it went into
the operations and maintenance phase. Mike
Wash, NARA's CIO, said the use of Technical
Direction Letters is one of the key lessons
learned from the TechStat session ERA went
through in 2010.

TechStat is rarely about shutting down
problematic technology programs. In an exclusive
report, Federal News Radio examines how agencies
are using the analysis to support existing
improvement plans, to move to agile development
and to change its relationship with contractors.
CBP, NARA and the FBI are recent examples of
agencies taking advantage of the visibility and
transparency TechStat brings to get programs
back on track and completed.